


For us, There is no Elsewhere

by lc2l



Category: His Dark Materials - Philip Pullman
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-22
Updated: 2013-12-22
Packaged: 2018-01-05 13:44:34
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,427
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1094572
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lc2l/pseuds/lc2l
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Dame Hannah Relf has lived a very long and busy life, but sometimes it feels like her best years were the ones spent watching this young woman grow up.</p>
            </blockquote>





	For us, There is no Elsewhere

**Author's Note:**

  * For [emei](https://archiveofourown.org/users/emei/gifts).



> For Emei for Yuletide - I hope you like it!
> 
> Thanks to CK and NS for support, beta-ing and loving everyone as much as I do <3

The midsummer sun shines in through the window, throwing light on the clock striking half past two. It’s an antique, dug out of the extensive basements of St Michael's College by St Sophia’s founder in an attempt to give the office – small, droughty, prone to damp – an air of the same grace and dignity as similar offices in the stately ancient men’s colleges that surrounded it.

Dane Hannah Relf looks down at her wristwatch – far newer and more reliable, using some sort of crystal technology that Dame Hannah doesn't presume to understand. It seems as though she looked away from the academic world for a moment while finding her feet as a college master and technology jumped three leagues forward, leaving her somewhere in the archaic behind. In spite of all the watch’s mysticism, it reads the same time as the clock that the maids wind every evening.

Dame Hannah would never admit it to her colleagues – not the master of St Michael's who sniffs at the wallpaper when he visits or the St Sophia’s vice chancellor, twenty years her junior, who has started eying up Dame Hannah's office as though preparing to move in – but she is starting to feel her age. The former master at Jordan took a back seat some eight years ago now and is settled one of Jordan College's many mansions with a butler, a few maids and all the time in the world to smoke and read his books. That lifestyle is starting to look more and more appealing.

Dame Hannah picks a paper from the piles stacking up on her desk – an inventory of new supplies for the chemistry room that she's supposed to approve or decline. To her eyes, it’s nothing but a list of chemicals she couldn’t pronounce, let alone name the purpose of, alongside test tubes and gas burners. Back in the day, they used to blow their own test tubes – although that was in Europe where she had spent many years and large amounts of her family’s fortune fighting her way into the male-dominated world of scholars and experimental theology.

But look at the world now – St Sophia's booming, St Anne's starting out and even talk of one of the men's schools turning mixed in the fall. There are fights left, of course. Radicalists are talking about women in the clergy, women as leaders in industry, even women in the military. It would all have been beyond impossible forty years ago, but now Dame Hannah is happy enough to take a back seat, leave those battles for the new generation.

Speaking of – Dame Hannah checks her watch again. Lyra had said she’d be at the botanic garden at twelve, and would stay for at least an hour. It's a twenty minute walk from there to St Sophia's – probably closer to fifteen at a younger woman's pace. It's not that Lyra doesn't have the funds for a cab, but Dame Hannah has never seen her take one. Unlike the other girls, Lyra has no fear of getting lost or caught out on the winding Oxford streets.

"She did say today, didn't she?" Dame Hannah asks, turning her head to the marmoset crouched on the back of her chair.

"As far as I recall," Haseir says. "But our mind isn't what it used to be."

No. It's definitely past time to retire, to put themselves out to pasture as it were. They’ve only held out this long because there was one story they had to see through to the end.

Dame Hannah is just reaching for the bell to call a boy when there's a knock on the door. She drops the chemistry paper back onto the pile and calls, "Come in."

Lyra Silvertongue slips in through the door, running her hands over her tartan skirt in an attempt to hide the wrinkles while Pantalaimon sits on her head and uses his small paws to push the strands of hair falling out of her bun behind her ears. The blouse and skirt alone are certainly smart enough for the college, however no matter what Lyra wears she always somehow gives the impression of having entered the office through a window.

"Sorry I'm late. I was on my way back from the gardens, I swear, but Ritchie caught me coming through the courtyard and pulled me into the kitchens to say goodbye and then the maids came down to wish me luck and I lost track of time –"

Dame Hannah has known girls come in as undergraduates and stay through degrees, doctorates and scholarships without knowing where the kitchens are, let along the names of anyone who works there.

"That's fine, Lyra. Feel free to sit down."

Lyra smiles, wide and slightly gap-toothed, but bright enough that it lights her whole face. She pulls out the chair opposite Dame Hannah and sits in it, pulling the strap of her leather satchel off over her shoulder. "I brought you something," she says, opening the bag to reach inside.

The leather bag was Lyra's high school graduation gift from the master of Jordan, and she has barely been seen without it since. It has a pocket for the alethiometer, another for the leatherbound notepad and pen that one of the girls at school had given her. Lyra tugs out a bound sheath of paper and places it carefully on the desk.  
 _ ****_

 _ **Polar Ice, Subtle Windows and the Panserbjørne**_

  
 _

A study into the lasting effects of the Auroran Window on ice-melt and warming in the North

_  
 _

Lyra Silvertongue

_

The dissertation is longer than many PhD theses. Dame Hannah opens the first page to scan over the abstract. Lyra's writing style is concise, simple. In three short paragraphs she introduces and explains concepts that Dame Hannah knows professional scholars are still having trouble wrapping their head around.

Lyra is fidgeting in her chair, as though she's back in her first years of high school submitting lists of questions translated into symbol layers for Dame Hannah to tell her all the places she's messed up. Dame Hannah lets the cover fall back down. "How was your presentation?"

Lyra has to think about that one. "Alright," she says in the end. "I don't think they believed me about everything, but I got the funding and I didn't even have to pull out a severed head."

Sometimes conversations with Lyra are charming, other times they have Dame Hannah reaching for the smelling salts. She's not entirely sure if any of the St Sophia's staff would've been shocked to see Lyra pull out a frozen head – she's certainly got a reputation in the staff room for being her father's daughter. "Ah – well – I would hope not."

Lyra grins. "I asked the alethiometer the night before if I should keep one in reserve – hourglass, globe, compass."

Dame Hannah takes a moment to think through Lyra's logic. The hourglass, death, skull. The globe for Lyra's trip and the funding she needs. The compass for scholars. "What did it tell you?"

"I think it told me to stop wasting my time with the symbol books and go to sleep, but I fell asleep halfway through looking up meanings for the moon." Lyra scratches the edge of Dame Hannah's desk with one finger. "I took the books back to Bodley's Library this morning. I was thinking – I mean I can’t ask much without them, so it – it doesn’t seem worth - it's like –" Lyra stops, takes a breath, and seems to be getting her thoughts in order. Then she reaches into the bag and pulls out the alethiometer, dropping it on the edge of the desk.

After a year of travelling around the worlds and then ten years in a school-girl's backpack, the gold casing is scuffed and the glass front has a few long scratches but the slim needle still swings from picture to picture in a seemingly endless flow of patterns and words that no one has the time to decipher.

"We think it would be best if you look after it," Pantalaimon says, pushing it across the desk with his nose, while Lyra holds her hands in her lap like she's worried she'll snatch it back. "While we're away."

Four alethiometers were destroyed years ago. The church has a single one left, with endless debates going on as to whether they should destroy it. The magesterium is split – as it is on all important issues of late – between those who say it speaks the word of God and those who say that no human should have the omniscience that mastery of it conveys.

Given that, it is almost unforgivably reckless to send one of the last of them into the wilds on a trip to unknown lands with a less than guaranteed chance of return. It would be better, really, to keep it here in the hands of a woman who has dedicated so much of her life to learning what the symbols mean. Dame Hannah could run her college for another twenty years with the alethiometer to guide her decisions, and lead them into a great age of prosperity.

Lyra is carefully not looking down at it, her hands twisting in her lap like she's having to hold them back – fingers moving as though setting imaginary dials to invisible symbols.

Dame Hannah sighs and pushes the alethiometer back across the woodwork. "I have a gift for you, to celebrate your graduation." She reaches behind the desk for the brown package and picks it up, passing it across.

"You shouldn't have –" Lyra starts, but Pantalaimon has already stepped away from the alethiometer to bite the string holding the package closed. Lyra glances up at Dame Hannah, who nods, and then pulls the paper clear.

The books are newly bound, spines un-cracked and corners fresh and sharp. Lyra's mouth drops open as she spreads the pile out, running her fingers along the titles embossed in gold in the dark green leather.

__

_A Full and Comprehensive Dictionary of the Alethiometer_

  
 _

Volumes one through fourteen

_

Pantalaimon steps back a little, Lyra touches the covers with her fingertips and looks up at Dame Hannah, eyes wide and shining. "Is this – I thought there was only the one set –"

Dame Hannah smiles. "Books can be re-printed."

"I can't take this –"

"Of course you can." Dame Hannah reaches forward to restack them, placing the alethiometer neatly on top. "I asked for them to be as small as possible, I know weight is limited in a balloon but I hoped you would be able to make space." She smiles. "You have achieved a great deal in ten years, it would be a shame to lose all that now thanks to a lack of practice."

"I'll practice every day," Lyra says fervently. "I'll make space, if I have to throw everything out. Thank you, thank you." She picks the pile up, holding it close to her for a moment before picking up her satchel and trying to work out how best to fit them in. Dame Hannah steeples her fingers and watches her.

It was just over ten years ago, when the master of Jordan sent someone to invite Dame Hannah to a dinner and she turned up to find that instead of a whole crowd of scholars and masters, she was eating with him and Lyra Silvertongue. Dame Hannah had barely recognised her to begin with. She'd been taller and slimmer but more than that – something in her eyes had changed. Somewhere along the line she'd grown up. It had been simple enough to see why, after she started telling her story. Tartars and panserbjørne and other worlds. Ghosts, spectres, the war on God himself. Dame Hannah had offered her school and her advice, but she remembers wondering how Lyra would cope. How could a girl go through all that and then be expected to step back into society afterwards as though she'd never been away?

Lyra had provided the answer to that question. She'd visited Dame Hannah's office ten years ago with Pantalaimon on her shoulder as he was now and said yes – yes to everything. She'd gone to school, for the first time in her life, and Dame Hannah had been sent regular reports of a girl who seemed strangely behind in subjects like maths and handwriting but who could stand up in physics to deliver a ten minute lecture on elementary particles that left her teacher reaching for his textbooks.

She visited Dame Hannah once a week with the alethiometer clutched tight in a small leather handbag – she'd never left it in the office between sessions, however much Dame Hannah might suggest that it would be safer – and had studied the books with a diligence to equal any scholar Dame Hannah could name.

So the lessons went on, for nigh on ten years. Lyra took home sheets of questions to figure out. She wrote ten page essays on individual symbols and brought back questions that she wanted to learn how to ask. She kept coming over the shorter holidays which she spent at Jordan college; and Dame Hannah would set long assignments for the summer break when Lyra would travel down the fens with the Gyptians or fly up to lake Enara with the witches who would take her on the back of their cloudpine branches to see the bears.

And somewhere along the line, she'd finished growing up. Lyra sits up in her chair, brow furrowing a little as she sees Dame Hannah watching her. "What? Have I got something on my face?"

Dame Hannah laughs. "I was just thinking of that evening with the master of Jordan, when you would only tell us your story if we promised to believe it first."

Lyra smiles self-consciously, like any other woman being reminded of what she was like as a girl. "Turns out you can't use that before proposing a theory to a room full of scholars." She turns her head to glance at the clock.

"Are you in a hurry?"

"We’re meeting Billy Costa at five on his narrowboat to head up to the aeroport. Dan's meeting us there tonight to stow our gear before we take off tomorrow. We've got a long way to go in a year, so we've got to start as soon as we can."

Dame Hannah heard the majority of Lyra's story ten years ago, and has had snippets and moments from it in the years since, but she isn't sure she will ever fully understand how Lyra could deem it worth wasting half the funding for her trip to guarantee that she will be home before the next midsummer.

The St Sophia's librarian – a middle-aged woman with a scholar husband and three children – always clicks her tongue when Dame Hannah brings it up and says that the college mistress clearly doesn't understand what it is to be in love. Dame Hannah lets this lie – she was too driven for it when she was young, and too old for it now, she thinks – but looking at Lyra's determined face now, she could understand. If it was for Lyra – for Lyra she might do anything.

"Dan?" she says.

"Daniel Cansino," Lyra says. "Our aeronaut. His father was friends with Lee Scoresby."

When she turned eighteen, Lyra had received a letter from a solicitor in Nova Zembla informing her that she was now of-age to receive an account of gold from one Lee Scoresby, who had left a will with them many years before on his way up North to find Stanislaus Grumman. The money had come with a note that Lyra had never let anyone else read, but that had filled her eyes with tears.

Lyra had promised to use to money to keep travelling, keep researching, keep learning. Now she was finally graduated and ready to head off with another aeronaut to keep that promise.

Dame Hannah nods. She's given Lyra the books and she has Lyra's dissertation, there's no real reason to keep the girl from her packing, except that she can't seem to find the words to say goodbye. "Has Emilia spoken to her father yet?"

Lyra's face twists a little and for a moment Dame Hannah thinks she's going to lie. Dame Hannah might be the only person who can tell when Lyra is lying to her – something about the determined set of her jaw – but Lyra is more honest that not these days. Lyra sighs heavily. "She sent him a note, but he didn't reply."

Dame Hannah raises one eyebrow. "I should think a young lady like you would insist on your companion's father receiving rather more than a _note_ before you drag his daughter up into the arctic for twelve months."

Of course, Lord Du Miel didn't make things easy for himself by still pretending he lived in a world where his daughter was going to go home to any day now to attend balls and search for a husband. In Lord Du Miel’s world, young ladies did not get college degrees or run off to measure ice melt on the arctic tundra. They also, presumably, never met girls like Lyra.

"He'll start talking about husbands again," Lyra says. "Em can find a husband any time she likes when we get back."

Dame Hannah could point out that Emilia Du Miel has had no interest in finding a husband since the moment she first set eyes on Lyra Silvertongue; but Lyra will never understand, however much it's explained to her. She simply cannot comprehend the effect she has on people.

Lyra glances at the clock again. Her fingers are twitching and on her shoulder Pantalaimon's tail is flicking back and forth. Dame Hannah has kept them long enough. She stands up – pushing on the arms of her chair and feeling her knees creak upright. She leaves her walking stick but rests her hand on the polished oak to walk around and take both Lyra's hands in hers.

"Do you remember back when you finished your story, and the master said you could easily become a preacher, you speak so well?"

Lyra frowns, apparently thinking back. "I think so, yes."

"Do you remember what you said?"

"I said – I said that that ent what the republic of heaven is. It's not me telling you what to think or you telling others what to think. It's me thinking and you thinking and maybe we talk about it, maybe we don't but mostly we build something with it. We can't just think, we have to do."

Dame Hannah nods, and before she can stop herself with thoughts of politeness and decorum, she pulls Lyra into a hug. "Well you've done some amazing things, Lyra. I look forward to seeing what comes next."

Lyra doesn’t hesitate to hug her back. "Thank you," she says, pulling away to pick up her bag and lift Pantalaimon onto her shoulder. "I’ll see you next midsummer.”

Dame Hannah looks around the ornate stone room. "I think I'll be out of here by then, but I’m sure my replacement will know where to find me. You can stop round for tea.”

Lyra hesitates. “You’re leaving St Sophia’s? Who’s going to teach me about the alethiometer?”

Dame Hannah smiles at her. “I am getting too old to run a school, and you are getting too old to need a teacher. Come by for tea next year, bring me a narwhale tooth and we can learn together, as equals.”

Lyra rushes forward to hug her one last time. “Thank you,” she says again, then she’s pulling away to run out the door, her footsteps clattering down the corridors.

Dame Hannah sinks into Lyra's chair, it being closer. "Are we ready to step back and let the world get on without us?" Dame Hannah asks.

Haseir climbs onto her arm and her shoulder to look out the door where Lyra is darting down the corridor to her room where the old housekeeper will surely have done all her packing for her because the staff in the collage love her as much as the scholars do, as much as the witches do and as much as the bear king of Svalbard does. "I think it's in safe hands," he says.

Dame Hannah nods. She'll need ink, and parchment to write a resignation. Perhaps she should get in touch with the former master of Jordan. If she could get a house nearby to his – he was certainly an interesting debating partner at all those dinners.

For now, she picks up Lyra's dissertation and starts to read.


End file.
